This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Now there is in an opportunity to fulfil the heady optimism of the Charter debates and respectfully resolve land claims and treaty implementation.

Peyal Laceese, of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation in Williams Lake, B.C., dances during a protest against Taseko Mines Ltd.'s proposed Prosperity Mine. A Supreme Court ruling last week upheld a claim by the Tsilhqot'in to more than 1,700 square kilometres of land in B.C. (DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Robin V. Sears

Tues., July 1, 2014

People were strewn exhausted across Ed Broadbent’s grand old parliamentary office on sofas, window ledges and desks. It was near the end of an intense four-hour negotiating session with some of Canada’s most important First Nations leaders and their lawyers. There was a sense that a consensus was finally, perhaps, possible.

Suddenly, one of the young lawyers stood up and said, “No, this is not good enough. Let’s take a break.” Many of the tired participants looked up in shock and then anger. I followed the young Vancouver lawyer into the hall. We stared angrily at each other in silence.

Then he said, slowly, “Look, I’m sorry, but all of a sudden I had this vision. I’m sitting on the porch with my granddaughter 30 years from now, and she’ll ask me ‘Grandpa, did you really do everything you could do to help our native people. Everything?!’”

The memories of that day, the powerfully emotional negotiations of the final wording of what became the First Nations rights section of the Charter came flooding back this week. I watched an elevator news ticker convey the astonishing news of the Supreme Court decision on Tsilhqot'in aboriginal title this week and gasped.

Their decision, which they made clear was grounded in the rights granted in Section 35 of the Charter, came almost precisely 33 years after those stormy meetings.

Article Continued Below

Now it is again the turn of Canada’s political leaders to step up and negotiate the path forward. The army of government lawyers and officials who have wasted literally billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money pretending to advance the issues of land claims, treaty implementation and resource revenue sharing have been shoved into the ditch by this decision. Progress will need political leadership.

The opportunity the court’s decision — astonishingly, unanimous — has created is for serious political negotiations to set the new rules, establish the frameworks for resource development that respect First Nations social and economic rights. Ottawa probably won’t convene the federal/provincial discussions — with First Nations and Canadian business leaders as participants — now required. So the provinces’ Council of the Federation could seize the baton. The summer meetings of the western premiers could lay the groundwork.

For whatever legal hairsplitting nonsense those who have made millions and their careers out of the current negotiating impasse may claim, two things are now clear. There will be no unilateral resource development on contested lands, period. Those development projects that do proceed will require consent, not merely consultation with the Aboriginal Peoples affected. To get there will require political agreement, probably to be followed by legislation and regulation. Once again, Canada’s highest court has said to our political elites, don’t continue to play legal games, using us as your excuse for inaction: “Do your job!”

The good news is that this decision empowers the rational and moderate voices on all sides. The cowboys in the resource sector have been told no, but so have the hardheads in the First Nations world who have simply said, “Never!” to any effort at shared resource development. Now there is an open door to a Canadian approach to unlocking the billions of dollars in resource wealth through agreement, not diktat.

Now there is in an opportunity to fulfil the heady optimism of those Charter debates and respectfully resolve land claims and treaty implementation, to create job and economic opportunities for hundreds — perhaps thousands — of First Nations men and women from B.C. and across Canada.

It will require creative and courageous leadership. It will mean that serious First Nations leaders committed to finding solutions will need to stare down their internal critics. It will mean that resource company CEOs will need to explain to their boards and shareholders why this negotiated path forward — slower and probably more expensive — is a more secure path, and ultimately therefore more profitable.

Most of all it will require political leaders who are prepared to tell their caucuses and parties, as Margaret Thatcher loved to say, “There is no alternative ... ”

We know how to do this. Successful negotiated agreements have been transforming the lives of Yukon First Nations and Quebec Cree peoples, among many other smaller agreements, for a generation already.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com